Easy night at the PRMCC meeting getting approval for the ninth beaver festival which was a veritable piece of cake. Committee Dylan Radke even asked, ‘The other day I noticed what looked like a beaver dam down by the corp yard?” Good eyes! I made sure they had this before I left.

No luck seeing beavers this morning, lots of ripples but nobody surfaced. When they don’t feel like showing their faces they zip back and forth under the water between holes on each side of the bank. How quickly they have gone on about their busy lives and taken me for granted! No baby ducks either, but there was a mockingbird making his dawn chorus all by himself, and that was lovely.

Now onto a nice letter in the paper in Sakatchewan about the kill contest, featuring an extremely rare ugly photo of a beaver. The editor’s must have searched through samples for hours to find the ONE picture that was certain to engender the least sympathetic response. Hrmph!

‘Derby of death’

The beaver is the icon of Canada — historically, for its energy and labour; symbolically, for its ideal of hard-working people and, linguistically, as a byword for the wonderful land we have inherited.

The Saskatchewan government is encouraging the torture and killing of these beautiful animals in a competition for the deaths of these icons — a derby of death.

This is obscene. It is anti-environment and destroys our land and our culture. It teaches children — and adults — that life itself is to be destroyed for profit or reinvented amusement. It encourages the pervert, the psychopath and the inadequate man. It must stop.

Michael Watts, Goderich, Ont.

A cynic might say that beaver trapping is actually the icon of Canada. But it’s nice to see someone saying the obvious. I myself would rather see a letter about the resources they’re throwing away by ignoring beaver benefits to fish, birds wildlife. Certainly I agree the derby is barbaric, and those photos of a truck full of beaver tails knock out my breath, but you won’t catch me saying that in public. I just think it makes it too easy to dismiss the idea that opposition is just from some crazy bunny huggers and therefore doesn’t matter.

I commented this instead:

Even laying aside the massive environmental benefits of beaver dams to fish, waterfowl, game animals; even ignoring the way their dams remove toxins and nitrates, even ignoring the fact that kill contests don’t work and create species rebound the following years — Even ignoring all THAT Saskatchewan should realize that this action is giving them a huge black eye in the world and is showcasing their ignorance on an international level. Why are reasonable solutions successful in every other part of the northern hemisphere but untried there?

Mario is painting his way to success on the mural, with both sides nearly meeting in the middle and a beaver and a turtle added yesterday.